Happily Slipping into Our Straitjackets

America's Love Affair with Drugs and How We Came to so Easily Accept Sacrificing Our Children on the Altar of Big Pharma

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A few days ago, I watched a disturbing video of a star student athlete collapsing at the finish line of a running race.

How she described it: I felt like I just wasn't being able to get a full breath. Multiple times of that happening, not being able to get enough air -- I just felt super-dizzy, and then eventually passed out. In the past, this has never happened. Then this race that I was wearing a mask, it did happen, which I don't think is a coincidence.

When I posted this story on social media and suggested doing this to our children amounted to child abuse, I was accused of being “irresponsible and stupid.”

About three times a week I run from where I live to Whole Foods, get myself an iced chai and walk back. It’s a long way and takes me about three hours. Having trained for more years than I care to mention in martial arts, Eskrima, boxing and kickboxing, exercise is an important part of my life. I have a firm belief in the healing attributes of exercise. I do not wear a mask. I cannot imagine covering my mouth and nose and impeding my ability to breathe.

As I go on this running journey, I pass two schools, usually when the children are on the playground. All of them are wearing masks.

The grandmother of a twelve-year-old granddaughter was telling me how her granddaughter refuses to take her mask off when picked up from school. Even when she leaves the school grounds and no one is around, she is so fearful, she will not remove it. Girls at this age are already beginning to have issues with body image and want to hide away, become silent and unseen. This isn’t helping.

Not only that, but our children are also now breathing bad air for eight hours a day, even when exerting themselves on the playground or when competing in sports. The irony of this is inescapable. We are being told that society must make drastic changes to clean our environment, yet we are forcing our children to breathe toxic air.

“Pediatric mask-wearing has been found to have discernible effects on fear, anxiety, and language development.  In one survey of Polish young adults wearing masks due to COVID-19, 97 percent perceived inconvenience or adverse effects; 35 percent of those reported difficulty breathing. Mask-wearing at longer durations can impact thermoregulation and thermal stress. A recent German study found masks to have a "negative impact on cardiopulmonary capacity...and quality of life"

One insidious step at a time, we have now gone beyond masks. We are experimenting with COVID vaccines on children and on babies. It boggles my mind that parents proudly show how they are offering up their children for these COVID vaccine experiments. How has it happened that we have come to blindly accept this?

It all started with a Faustian bargain between Big Pharma, Advertising and Government.

In the first episode of that brilliant TV show, Mad Men, Don Draper lays it out clearly:

“Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. You, feeling something, that’s what sells.”

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

This mantra is as American as apple pie. It is our right to be happy. If we aren’t, we are somehow failing.

The United States represents 5 % of global population yet. Approximately 80 percent of the global opioid supply is consumed in the United States. There are those who argue with this statistic, but I think we can all agree it isn’t hard to believe. Americans consume almost all of the global opioid supply (cnbc.com)

1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug. The percentage of Americans taking more than five prescription medications had nearly tripled in the past 20 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017. Half of us take some form of prescription medication. Almost 1.3 million people went to U.S. emergency rooms due to adverse drug effects in 2014, and about 124,000 died from those events. America's Love Affair With Prescription Medication - Consumer Reports

We are slaves to the pharmaceutical companies and they like it that way. Billions of dollars are at stake. This pandemic has given mega companies, in collusion with government, a pathway to increased control over every aspect of our lives. We know that drugs are a plague. Yet, just like tobacco use, just like drinking that poison called Coca Cola, we keep on “chasing the dragon.” Instead of accepting that unhappiness is a part of life, like people do in less affluent parts of the world, we keep on believing that we can fix our unhappiness with just one more drug cocktail.

As a single mother who has raised three kids on the violent streets of Los Angeles suburbia, and as a writer who co-founded a creative writing program for incarcerated youth, I’ve heard countless drug-related stories told by children, both inside juvenile detention facilities and rehab centers, and outside in my own neighborhood.

I want to share those stories here. They go back about ten years. But it’s important to look at the history of how this acceptance of drugging our children arose. I’m not saying there aren’t extreme cases where it’s necessary to medicate children, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Jimmy was an ordinary 16-year-old kid living in the exclusive Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas. He was 12 years old when he was prescribed Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.

“It was creepy,” he said. “I could totally just sit in my chair and stare at the teacher for hours and I could hear every single word, like in slow motion. That’s how it is—you can concentrate on stupid tasks but you’re not really there inside yourself. It’s as if something else is controlling you. It was horrible. I started pretending to take my pills but wouldn’t.”

Jimmy had reason to be distracted and depressed. His older sister committed suicide in the mansion his family inhabited. Jimmy couldn’t bear to be in that haunted house, no matter how deceptively beautiful it appeared on the outside.

Jimmy was best friends with my oldest son. The first time my eldest son got into trouble for a fight was on the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Jimmy’s sister. I think they were around the age of fourteen. They were hanging out at the Calabasas Commons. Some other kid had been making fun of Jimmy’s sister and my son beat him up. I remember rushing down to pick my son up the moment I received the phone call from the Commons security guards.

They were surprised to see me. “Most parents around here wouldn’t interrupt their important dinner, or whatever, to pick up their child.”

Jimmy ended up camping on the sofa of our small apartment for the next two years. He just never wanted to go home. It was too painful.

“So, what happens with all the drugs kids are supposed to be taking?” I asked him.

He eyed me like I was dense. “Didn’t those doctors think about what would happen when they dumped a ton of fucking drugs on us? Eight-year-olds, six-year-olds—they trade pills then start selling them. Little drug dealers growing up to be corporate monsters.”

The manufacture and dissemination of drugs to the general population is an accepted industry, generating billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies without any concern for the long-term consequences on the human guinea pigs: our children. Academics determine through research funded by drug companies that the public is suffering from myriad mental diseases. Psychiatrists, in turn, prescribe the medications developed by the drug companies. A tidy circle of profit ensues.

Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer at the division of medical ethics at Harvard School of Medicine and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, states that “there is fairly good evidence that the research has been tainted because of the financial relationships between academic researchers and drug companies.”

We all know this now. We know it! And yet, we still hop on board with the experimental testing of our children with this vaccine. Pfizer launches pediatric trial to test Covid vaccine in children (nbcnews.com)

How did we become this complacent, dare I say this brainwashed?

For decades the United States is one of only two countries in the world that allows direct to consumers ads for drugs. On May 19, 1983, Boots aired the first broadcast television commercial in the United States for a prescription drug, the pain reliever Rufen. The untold story of TV’s first prescription drug ad (statnews.com)

Powerful, highly addictive drugs are marketed directly to families through Stepford Wives-like TV and magazine ads, showing smiling, sedated children and their equally smiling and sedated parents, happily ingesting their medication. Just watch any Women’s TV show, where every other ad is pushing a mood-altering medication, complete with a bizarre, creepy little creature following the woman around like something out of the Twilight Zone.

Once, I heard one teenage girl telling another, “I don’t wanna be an ‘ad kid.’”

I asked what she meant.

“Oh, you know, those kids who go around school saying, ‘I’m on Zoloft, I’m so happy…I’m on Zoloft, I’m so happy.’ I don’t wanna be an ad for a drug company.”

Her friend responded, “Oh yeah, I tried Zoloft. It turned everything gray. The world went gray. I was sick for two days, puking.”

One morning I was sitting with two girls, 18-year-old Jennifer and 15-year-old Andrea. The topic turned to drugs, as it often does with youth. I asked them what they thought was the biggest difference between the drug situation on the opposite ends of the San Fernando Valley, or the SFV: Calabasas and Pacoima. Just to clarify, Calabasas is where all the rich kids live, made famous by the Kardashians infamous reality show, and Pacoima is where all the gangbangers live—that’s the stereotype in a nutshell. Which had a bigger drug problem?

They shrugged. “You can get drugs anywhere. There’s no difference.”

Jennifer laughed. “Actually, I’d say Calabasas is worse.”

Urban Dictionary has some colorful descriptions of Calabasas. Check it out, it’s quite illuminating. I love this one, short and to the point:

Dante’s forgotten 10th circle of hell. 

Jennifer: “You can get anything there. Everybody’s dad or mom is a doctor or a lawyer or a psychiatrist. Prescription drugs, being mentally sick, going to therapy, it’s just, like, that’s what you do. So, everybody’s either taking pills, selling or both. We’re all drug experts, we know how to access info better than our parents. We know which drugs are used for which effect and what the active ingredients are.”

She took a drag off her legal drug of choice—a cigarette. She pointed her cig at me sagely. “The ‘just say no’ campaign turned into ‘just say yes.’ If a psychiatrist says you need to be on meds, you fucking better say yes or you’re in trouble.”

She smirked at a sudden thought. “Or else, you play the system. Like, this is what you do. You go to your therapist and fake something. Like this guy, Brandon. He got grounded for two months and he wanted to get out of it, so he starts faking panic attacks. His parents send him to a psychiatrist. He tells the doc, I got something against the number 3, it just freaks me out. The doc says, what do you mean? He says, ‘well, see that open filing cabinet? I’ve been looking at it for the past 20 minutes and it has three folders in it. It’s making me nervous.’ I mean, Brandon just made that up, he didn’t have anything against the number 3. End result? He gets put on medication and he’s been selling it ever since.”

Andrea had been quiet all this time, but now she spoke up. “I don’t fake my problems. I take Wellbutrin for depression and Trazodone for anxiety and anger. I’ve been hospitalized twice, once because I tried to commit suicide. I saved up and took 23 pills at once. They said when they got to me, I was two minutes away from being dead.”

If you look up Wellbutrin, it warns that it is approved only for adults 18 years and over. No trials have been conducted in younger children. Andrea, as I said, is 15. Think about it. How is this possible? And then, remember what I said above about these vaccines.

“So, what do you think of the meds?” I asked.

“I hate it. I feel like a rat in a cage, an experiment. They put me on something and then, if it doesn’t work, they put me on something else. They don’t know what they’re doing. My adoptive mom had her leg amputated last year and my dad has hepatitis C, so I know I have issues. You can see I’m overweight—hello! I get made fun of. Kids throw food at me; I can’t describe how bad every day of my life is at school. I got anger issues. But nobody helps me deal with it. They just put me on meds.”

And now, what happens? The fact that suicides have gone up due to lockdowns, nobody cares. I won’t even bother putting any links here because all you have to do is google this one and you will see many. Yet, incredibly, it’s as if suddenly with this pandemic, no other illness or mental health problems exist. Everything is COVID. Everything is about “solving this problem” through vaccines.

Just take your meds. If you obey, you can get back to normal. You can be happy.

In The untold story of TV's first prescription drug ad, when the first ad came out FDA aid Lou Morris, who helped oversee the agency’s drug promotion office, said. “We were really concerned about what would these ads look like. Would it trivialize people’s view of what a prescription drug is? How much would they play on emotion as opposed to rational positive benefits?”

For years our emotions have been played upon by drug companies, knowing this was the way to hook people into dependency. This has made it incredibly easy for the government to use these same tactics to sell the fear of this pandemic and make us believe we can solve the problem by happily rolling up the sleeves, not just of ourselves but of our children.

How did all of these medications become so much a part of our everyday lives that we don’t give it a second thought?

The American Psychiatric Association has the unchecked power to convene and create new mental illnesses, which millions of people are then diagnosed with and given medication for. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is over 500 pages long, and lists mental conditions such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction,” and “Relational Disorder.” Where is the end of this?

ADHD is the most widely diagnosed mental disorder amongst children. Here is a perfect description of an ADHD child, one that is likely to send an overwrought parent running to the psychiatrist for medication:

“He entered the church, now, with a swarm of clean and noisy boys and girls, proceeded to his seat and started a quarrel with the first boy that came handy. The teacher, a grave, elderly man, interfered; then turned his back a moment and [he] pulled a boy’s hair in the next bench, and was absorbed in his book when the boy turned around; stuck a pin in another boy, presently, in order to hear him say “Ouch!” and got a new reprimand from his teacher. [His] whole class [was] of a pattern — restless, noisy, and troublesome. When they came to recite their lessons, the latter third of the speech was marred by the resumption of fights and other recreations among certain of the bad boys, and by fidgetings and whisperings that extended far and wide. Not one of them knew his verses perfectly but had to be prompted all along.”

Who is this frightening example of ADHD?

Tom Sawyer, the most beloved and idealized example of precocious boyhood behavior in American literature. Oh, but I forgot, Tom Sawyer is now in danger of being “cancelled” by the virtuous intellectual pundits who now tell us what we can and cannot read. Well, as long as I can still talk about him, I will. And his good friend Huck Finn. I love these stories.

Nowadays you can be sure that Tom and his sidekick, Huck Finn, would be put into Special Education, with a psychiatrist forcing them to take powerful meds. They would probably end up in juvenile hall. All that naturally impulsive inquisitiveness that made Aunt Polly throw up her hands in despair would be destroyed.

Imagine Tom Sawyer wearing a mask. Obsessively sanitizing all that wonderful dirt off his hands. I have a good imagination but that’s impossible.

Label a child with a mental disorder such as ADHD and “solve the problem” by prescribing pills having the effect of chemically straight-jacketing them.

Straitjackets.

Our children being forced to wear masks is a form of straitjackets. No longer will they remember a time when they could play freely in the fresh air. Little by little, we have been worn down over the years to accept doing the unthinkable. Next step, vaccinating our children as if they are little heroic warriors in the first line of defense. But children should not be used as a first line of defense to protect adults from an illness which children rarely get sick from. This is unconscionable.

Straitjackets were first introduced at the turn of the century, along with electric shock, hosing down, shackles, lobotomy and holes being drilled into brains to relieve “brain pressure.” German physicians gave birth to the idea of mental diseases of the brain, lending credence to the idea of treating it in the same way one might treat a physical disease. Psychiatry and the German State worked together to institutionalize those with “damaged minds,” which is really a form of the elite engineering eugenics on an unsuspecting public.

Dr. Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness, says, “The evil genius of psychiatry … continues to lie in its ability to convince itself, the legal system, and the public that … there is no conflict between the legitimate interests of the individual and the legitimate interests of the political class in charge of the state.”

Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), a prominent 19th-century German neuropsychiatrist observed, “The medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom.”

This started with the abuses described above, as well as other “benevolent tortures”—such as frightening patients by throwing them into snake pits, the origin of the term “snake pit” for insane asylum. These horrific restraints were precursors to the current drugs.

The methods of restraint are now so much more humane than in the past: little pills. And because they are little pills and we have been convinced we need to take them; people willingly give in to being constrained by them.

Certainly, when medicated, the child appears quieter and sits still in a chair for hours on end, something that our school system demands. But the child isn’t being more attentive. The child is zoned out, robbed of their innate wild energy. Because, after all, what child in his or her right mind should want to, or be forced to, sit for hours every day in a chair doing rote paperwork and being given countless standardized tests to evaluate success or failure? What child should want to daily enter an institution surrounded by gates and high walls, policed by drug dogs and security guards?

Now children are being masked and given this experimental vaccine. There are thousands upon thousands of doctors who dispute this. They have signed letters and tried to speak out, yet their voices have been silenced. For the crime of daring to go against the powerful, they have been vilified and have lost their jobs. They have no ties to big pharma and so their voices are unimportant. Yet they are the real experts, the ones we should listen to as they actually are in the trenches, treating the patients.

It was in 1973 that the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare—which includes the National Institute of Mental Health—created the Special Education Program for children with “learning disabilities.” This gave birth to a whole new army of experts who had to be trained and employed and, as such, had to justify their employment by identifying a certain number of Special Needs students in each school. Because for every Special Needs child, the government provides extra funding. In 1991, teachers were mandated to “actively seek to identify ADHD children.”

Who has the right to determine which children have “learning disabilities” and which don’t? Based on what? Which of us remembers even one quarter of what we learned in school anyway? Ultimately, who cares if a kid passes those tests or not? Who cares if a child can sit still or not? If they can’t sit still, maybe they shouldn’t be forced to do so. Maybe they should be outside, learning in a different way. Maybe the kids who have been labeled as somehow deficient, aren’t at all. Maybe they actually are smarter than we give them credit for. Who’s to say? Maybe it would be better if children learned in small groups in their neighborhoods, practiced meditation, martial arts, learned to balance a check book, social responsibility, the meaning of fulfillment instead of the illusion of happiness, discussed philosophy.

But no. Everyone must fit into a box. And for the many who don’t, they must be given a horrible, life-long label that screws up their faith in themselves. All so that the experts can justify their jobs.

We can look to the rise of prescription medications to treat ADHD as similar in how we have been indoctrinated to accept a COVID vaccine for children.

Neurologists warn against prescribing ADHD drugs to enhance a child’s performance in school. Even when the long-term effects might be detrimental, there is so much pressure to take the pill, put on the mask of perfection, and worry about the consequences later. 

Perhaps it might make sense to identify children with this label if there was a stringently objective test to clearly identify the ADHD child. Yet, University of Utah Psychiatrist Paul Wender—known as the Dean of ADHD—states in The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct: Szasz, Thomas S.

This brings to mind the PCR tests which WHO has finally admitted are inaccurate. Yet we still administer them and claim validity of the results.

Putting children on medication, and now making them wear masks and vaccinating them against an illness that rarely impacts them, deprives children of living an ordinary, carefree childhood. There are already enough fears to face growing up. Now they are even afraid to breathe.

I have talked to young people in their twenties who were on medication as children and say they felt cheated out of their childhoods. One young man told me, “When I found out that the doctors had basically been giving me cocaine since the age of six, and my parents had allowed it, I felt betrayed, like they’d been raping my brain, over and over, for years. I realized how it led to my drug addiction. I’d been putting a pill in my mouth for years. The next step was a needle in my arm.”

Today I asked my younger son, who is now 26, how many of the friends he grew up with have died due to drugs. He knows of at least twenty.

“How did they die?” I asked him.

“Some committed suicide. Some had just come out of rehab and OD’d trying to take the same dose of heroin as before. Others died from prescription drugs, like Xanax, mixed with alcohol or something. Sometimes their internal organs just gave out.”

And now, just last Christmas, his best friend died of a drug overdose.

After speaking with Andrea, she again attempted suicide and was institutionalized. No doubt the experts have mixed yet another cocktail of meds to try and “make her happy.”

The forced drugging of our children can well be described as the modus operandi rape of our children’s minds and bodies. Administering this vaccine is the next step on that nightmarish road to total mind/body control and thereby destruction of their spirits.

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A good read: “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” by Christopher Lane, professor of English at Northwestern University.

Sites to look at and used for this essay: National Alliance Against Mandated Mental Health; Project Censored; StoptheDrugWar.com; sntp.net (Say NO to Psychiatry); “The Myth of Attention Deficit Disorder” by Dr. Mark Barber; July 1996 Psychiatric Times, Vol. 13, No. 7

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